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As a tray of liquor pictures circulated across the celebration on the Stonewall Inn, an iconic homosexual landmark in New York Metropolis, Kelman watched whereas Parsons laughed along with his colleagues from the HIV-research lab he directed. On the time, Kelman had labored for under a few weeks on the Heart for HIV/AIDS Instructional Research and Coaching, generally known as CHEST. What little she knew of Parsons had come from her new colleagues, who had described the director as tempestuous and fast tempered, identified to berate subordinates in the midst of the workplace.
However right here, on Could 4, 2018, Parsons seemed to be in his component, absorbing the raunchiness of an evening that promised lewd humor, a drag-queen emcee, and severe drunkenness. This was “CHESTFest,” an annual bacchanal in honor of the middle, which was affiliated with the Metropolis College of New York’s Hunter School, the place Parsons was, at the moment, a 51-year-old distinguished professor of psychology.
CHESTFest’s repute preceded it. Kelman had heard from her coworkers concerning the earlier 12 months’s celebration: A booze cruise by the harbor with shirtless male dancers and, she had been informed, laborious medicine. The fruits of those occasions was when Parsons, as sole decide and jury, decided who was most inebriated and anointed that particular person with the title of “The Greatest Mess.” Strictly talking, CHESTFest was optionally available. However Parsons was susceptible to ridiculing those that skipped it, and the celebration was thought of the primary workers bonding occasion of the 12 months.
Even in her quick time at CHEST, a company of about 45 workers, Kelman had a way that rather a lot concerning the administration of the middle and Parsons was off. She had lately accomplished a grasp’s diploma in public well being on the College of Michigan at Ann Arbor, solely to search out that her friends on the junior workers for probably the most half had little formal work expertise exterior of the insular world of CHEST and had principally been promoted from inside.
As a mission coordinator on one among Parsons’s grants, Kelman labored for him, though he was not her direct supervisor. Earlier than CHESTFest, although, she had but to satisfy the director. After they lastly did meet that evening, he greeted her with a query: “Which one are you?”
Parsons had based CHEST in 1996, constructing over the next twenty years a mighty money cow that introduced thousands and thousands of {dollars} in grant cash to the college. The federal grants that fueled CHEST had established Parsons as a seemingly untouchable sovereign in an enormous college system that tended to offer the professor what he needed.
As turned clear to Kelman that evening, what Parsons needed was a debaucherous celebration that teetered continually on the border of impropriety. Throughout a karaoke competitors on the celebration, Parsons approached an worker onstage and unbuttoned the person’s pants, Kelman and different witnesses stated. Throughout one other music, the professor lifted an worker’s shirt, to the particular person’s seen shock and embarrassment. It was a record-scratch second that introduced the festivities to an abrupt conclusion, Kelman recalled. The sufferer fled the Stonewall in tears, working to the road, the place colleagues tried to supply comfort.
Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle
That was the start of the top of Parsons’s profession at CUNY. Earlier than lengthy, the CHESTFest debacle would price Parsons his job and his lab, and go away an enduring stain on his repute. So too would it not extinguish any lingering risk that the college, which had benefited so handsomely and for therefore a few years from Parsons’s analysis largesse, might any longer look the opposite manner.
Shocked by what had transpired, Kelman retreated with just a few coworkers to a close-by diner. Later, she texted a buddy, writing, “There was a really seen sexual assault on the finish of the celebration on Friday, so there’s a large organizational reckoning taking place.”
“The director is poisonous AF,” she added. “Like, a straight up bully, verbally abusive to senior workers and imply to everybody else.”
What Kelman didn’t absolutely understand on the time was that this episode had been a few years within the making, and one thing prefer it was fully foreseeable. A Chronicle investigation has recognized a number of pink flags and complaints about Parsons and CHEST that did not encourage something resembling a significant investigation or obvious intervention. Within the decade main as much as that evening, no less than six individuals had elevated issues about Parsons to human-resources officers or to school leaders. However in no case did complainants ever hear again, they informed The Chronicle. Meantime, prime Hunter officers continued to log out on raises, promotions, and new perks for Parsons. (In 2017 he earned $363,282.)
It was solely throughout the fallout of the 2018 CHESTFest, when the college appeared to don’t have any different selection, that an inquiry involving witnesses from throughout the group’s historical past came about. In its wake, CUNY reached a authorized settlement with among the professor’s accusers, proscribing what they will say concerning the case.
This account is predicated on greater than 1,000 pages of public paperwork and interviews with greater than two dozen individuals who labored with Parsons over the course of two unstable a long time. Most of the sources who spoke with The Chronicle stated they had been reluctant to revisit what they described as trauma. Some stated they feared that Parsons, even in his diminished skilled state, had the ability to wreck their careers by torpedoing grant functions or badmouthing them to employers. For these causes, The Chronicle has in a number of circumstances agreed to grant sources anonymity. The story they inform about Parsons, and CHEST, and the system that enabled him, is constant and particular: Jeff Parsons’s conduct was no secret, and anybody who didn’t find out about it might simply have came upon.
The recruiter’s job was important to the CHEST operation. For a lot of of its research, CHEST wanted homosexual males, who had been lively in New York’s celebration circuit, to inform them about their intercourse lives, their drug use, and, in the event that they had been HIV-positive, how they managed — or did not handle — taking their medicines whereas excessive on cocaine or different membership medicine.
CHEST obtained its begin across the starting of Invoice Clinton’s second time period as president, simply when huge federal cash was beginning to movement towards HIV-related analysis. Parsons, who’s homosexual, was in the fitting place on the proper time to capitalize on two issues: Authorization of the breakthrough “cocktail” of antiretroviral medicine to deal with HIV, and a liberal shift in nationwide politics. Seemingly in a single day, an space of analysis that had been politically toxic was turning into extra viable.
On one memorable evening, the recruiter was invited to hit a bar with Parsons, who was collaborating in an outreach effort generally known as the Drag Initiative to Vanquish AIDS. The DIVAs, because the group’s members known as themselves, would costume in drag and throw condoms round bars, conveying a jovial message about practising safer intercourse.
The recruiter had hoped to advance inside CHEST. He needed to be extra concerned in analysis, and he thought that getting near Parsons on a DIVAs outing would possibly assist. However he didn’t absolutely perceive what that may imply. After getting into a bar, he was bowled over when Parsons stopped to carry out oral intercourse on a patron, the recruiter stated.
The recruiter stated he couldn’t recall the title of the bar. However he remembered it as a typical homosexual bar — not a intercourse membership. Parsons was sending a message about CHEST to everybody within the room, the recruiter stated: “We’re scrumptious right here.”
The recruiter remembers being frightened and shocked. “In a low-level manner, it felt like strolling in on my mother and father. However it additionally felt like he was a monster. It felt like he was not protected.”
“I felt scared,” he added, “that he was … that there have been no boundaries.”
In an interview with The Chronicle, the recruiter’s husband stated that he recalled his then-boyfriend, with whom he lived on the time, telling him about Parsons performing oral intercourse within the bar. He additionally stated he remembered what his boyfriend informed him had occurred subsequent.
Hoping to impress his boss that evening, the recruiter froze when, he stated, Parsons directed him to carry out the identical intercourse act on somebody within the bar. “He pressured me to offer this man a blowjob, and I didn’t wish to,” the recruiter stated.
Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle
Parsons declined to be interviewed for this text, and he didn’t reply on to an in depth description of the incident with the recruiter or different allegations included on this report. In an announcement, Jeffrey Lichtman, Parsons’s lawyer, wrote, “From what we’ve been in a position to confirm, a lot of the allegations are from disgruntled former CHEST workers.”
Parsons has not been charged with against the law, and Lichtman added that “ought to any civil motion be introduced relating to those claims we look ahead to defending towards them inside a courtroom.”
The recruiter was, at the moment of the incident, an out homosexual man in his late 20s. However he had grown up feeling he had “this illness known as homosexual.” As a teen, he had spent memorably regretful periods with a psychiatrist whose job had been to speak him out of being gay. Parsons, in distinction, celebrated quite than pathologized the will to have intercourse with males. Within the bar that evening, although, the recruiter was overwhelmed by a way that Parsons’s model of gayness was horrifying and improper.
“Suck his dick,” the recruiter stated he remembered listening to Parsons say.
He tried to withstand. He made gentle of the stress.
“I keep in mind saying, ‘I don’t wish to, ha ha.’ Like making an attempt to be cute in resisting, however actually not eager to,” the recruiter stated.
To get out of the state of affairs, the recruiter stated, he lastly gave a fast smooch to the person’s penis. “I used to be not compelled, however I used to be positively pressured into it by Jeff,” the recruiter stated. “I don’t know that he knew how a lot I didn’t wish to do it.”
One other former CHEST worker was within the bar that evening, the recruiter stated, however the recruiter was not sure if his colleague had witnessed the incident. Contacted by The Chronicle, the previous worker stated that he didn’t keep in mind the particular episode however that he had heard Parsons boast about performing oral intercourse in public areas.
The recruiter didn’t contemplate within the second that the incident would possibly represent sexual harassment, though he remembered feeling responsible about what had occurred. Months later, the recruiter stop CHEST to take one other job, having labored on the lab for lower than two years. Other than his husband, he had, till now, by no means informed anybody what had occurred. Others did inform what had occurred to them, although, and nobody with the ability to alter it appeared to take severe motion.
“He’s a type of individuals who is aware of that he’s not palatable,” the coed stated of Parsons. “And so he waits till you’re embedded sufficient that he feels such as you owe him otherwise you’re not going to depart. And impulsively he reveals who he actually is. It’s just about like Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”
The coed remembers the exact second when the scales fell from his eyes. One other Ph.D. pupil in Parsons’s division had a congenital limb deficiency that brought about her fingers to be fused collectively. At a gathering the place the girl was not current, the coed stated, Parsons referred to her as “Dolphin Lady,” a remark the coed discovered beautiful in its cruelty.
Over time Parsons’s inhibitions across the pupil eased. One summer time, Parsons hosted a pool celebration at his home in New Jersey, bragging that the bartender he had employed was a porn star, the coed remembers. As the coed lay on a float within the pool, Parsons stopped to go with his butt, the coed stated. Parsons would continuously speak about “how sizzling” sure CHEST workers or examine members had been, the coed stated. He would rail, too, towards anybody who left the middle, which he noticed as a betrayal. “I hope she’s joyful educating neighborhood faculty,” the coed remembers him saying of a departing colleague. “That’s all she’ll ever do.”
Then there have been the medicine. The coed stated he noticed Parsons snort cocaine as soon as in his workplace earlier than a DIVAs occasion.
I felt scared that he was … that there have been no boundaries.
“He felt immune,” stated David S. Bimbi, one among Parsons’s longest-serving colleagues, who stated he additionally noticed Parsons use cocaine. “He operated that workplace like his fiefdom. If he needed to do traces of cocaine on his desk, that is his workplace, that is his world. His ego obtained larger and greater and greater. It simply obtained loopy.”
By the spring of 2010, Parsons was constructing CHEST into an empire — and he was throwing his weight round at Hunter School. Parsons was bringing monumental quantities of cash into the school’s psychology division, he stated in an e mail to a prime administrator, and but he needed to grovel for his share of it.
“I want a deputy chair for subsequent 12 months, or I severely will resign,” Parsons wrote to Vita C. Rabinowitz, who was provost on the time.
Rabinowitz acquiesced. “You’ll be able to actually have a deputy chair,” she responded. “The division is in each manner giant and complicated sufficient to deserve that.”
Within the fall of 2011, Parsons despatched one other e mail to Rabinowitz, this time concerning the “house disaster” at CHEST. Parsons complained of being “severely at my wits finish” about house constraints and “bored with spending my sabbatical NOT writing as was meant.”
In response, Rabinowitz wrote: “I perceive and I’m past sorry. You don’t deserve this.”
That 12 months, the middle introduced in $4.3 million in federal grants, a CHEST grant historical past reveals. Not solely was the middle flush with money, however its bodily house — just a few miles from Hunter School — meant that Parsons’s employer had little event to look at the day-to-day operations at CHEST. Nobody gave the impression to be watching the middle, as an illustration, when an worker obtained so drunk at an workplace celebration that he needed to be taken to a hospital, a number of CHEST sources stated. (The previous worker didn’t reply to interview requests.)
Who was liable for Parsons? Who was liable for CHEST? The byzantine administrative construction of the Metropolis College of New York makes that query extra sophisticated than one would possibly assume, and most workers at CHEST weren’t coached on the nuances. Parsons was employed by Hunter, however most of his subordinates had been workers of the Analysis Basis of the Metropolis College of New York, which manages grants for the entire college’s campuses. He additionally had a doctoral appointment on the CUNY Graduate Heart, an impartial campus the place many of the college’s doctoral packages are based mostly, and the place the graduate college students who labored at CHEST took their lessons. Worker complaints might have gone to any of those entities, and it isn’t clear in the event that they communicated with each other when individuals reported Parsons.
When the graduate pupil whom Parsons had mentored lastly stop, he reported his issues to Michelle Positive, a distinguished professor of psychology and concrete training on the Graduate Heart. He remembers telling her that CHEST was poisonous and that Parsons was mistreating college students. (Positive stated the coed didn’t inform her concerning the cocaine.)
The coed informed Positive about “the atmosphere, the language, the therapy of workers, the therapy of ‘topics’ in research,” she stated. “No person introduced me a sexual-harassment grievance. The type of factor that got here out on the very finish, that’s not the story I had heard. Though no person was shocked.”
Positive and a former college colleague, Suzanne C. Ouellette, had heard from a number of college students that there have been issues at CHEST — and so they felt an obligation to do one thing about it, they stated. Collectively, they associated these issues in particular person to Maureen O’Connor, who was then govt officer of the psychology program, and Tracey A. Revenson, who was the deputy govt officer, the professors stated. Positive stated she additionally contacted a school member from Hunter’s committee on sexual-harassment consciousness, whose title she couldn’t recall.
The director is poisonous AF. Like, a straight up bully.
O’Connor, who’s now president of Palo Alto College, stated in an e mail that she had “no reminiscence of a particular assembly” with the 2 professors about Parsons. Revenson, in an e mail, stated she had “no recollection of a proper assembly” with the professors, including, “in truth, my function didn’t embody dealing with pupil issues.” As college colleagues, Revenson stated, she and Positive had “had many casual conversations” about college students. Ouellette stated that she recalled the dialog about Parsons as “casual.” There was no mistaking, nevertheless, that the 2 professors had been involved concerning the experiences college students had been having at CHEST, they stated.
“Suzanne and I had been seen as making hassle,” Positive stated. “There was a rigidity round what I might now name whistle-blowing.”
Till 2018, within the fallout of CHESTFest, no administrator or human-resources official ever contacted the graduate pupil to speak about his expertise, he stated. If that they had, they might have gotten an earful. By leaving CHEST, the coed misplaced the monetary help that had include the place, forcing him to show extra lessons to make ends meet and stalling his tutorial progress.
“My life turned 500 % more durable,” the coed stated. “I’m in all probability going to be in debt for the remainder of my life due to Jeff, as a result of it was both pupil loans or be homeless.”
Parsons had secured for the event a complicated personal room surrounded by glass partitions that peered into the restaurant’s high-end wine assortment. The director ordered for himself and one other CHEST colleague an costly bottle of pink wine, Bimbi remembers, admonishing Bimbi when he poured himself a glass of it.
The cash that flowed into CHEST got here from federal grants, notably the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, which has strict guidelines prohibiting the usage of grant cash for buying alcohol. In gentle of that, CHEST colleagues assumed he had one other income from which to attract for his events. A number of CHEST sources stated Parsons had boasted of getting an unrestricted “slush fund” or “lush fund,” which he stated had been accepted by Jennifer J. Raab, the president of Hunter School. When the Del Frisco’s verify arrived that evening, Bimbi stated, Parsons laughed and pronounced: “Thanks, Jennifer Raab.”
A CUNY spokesman stated that, “in his function as director of CHEST, Parsons was in a position to submit receipts to get reimbursed for applicable bills, together with alcohol, from a Hunter School expense account.” Parsons “didn’t submit receipts nor was he reimbursed” for the 2011 dinner, CHESTfest 2018, or the booze cruise the 12 months prior, the spokesman stated.
Requested if Raab had accepted the creation of the expense account for Parsons, the spokesman stated that program leaders “usually go to the school provost and/or the president” to ascertain such accounts.
Raab was not made accessible for an interview.
Because the dinner at Del Frisco’s was coming to an in depth, Parsons started cajoling the girl with whom he had shared the bottle of wine, directing her to press her breasts towards the glass wall of the personal room, a number of attendees stated. “Come on, flash your tits,” Bimbi remembers Parsons saying.
The lady complied.
One other girl, a former CHEST worker, stated she was so upset by Parsons that she obtained up and left. She understands, she stated, why the opposite girl had agreed to reveal her breasts. Second to second, individuals at CHEST did what they needed to do to get by it.
“You need to discover a method to associate with it — and also you would possibly even attempt to persuade your self, ‘We’re all simply having enjoyable right here,’” the previous worker stated. “I believe that occurred to me as effectively.”
The incident on the dinner, the previous worker continued, highlighted the sophisticated energy dynamics that allowed Parsons to control subordinates. “Jeff is homosexual. He’s not making an attempt to have intercourse with me or intercourse with this girl,” the previous worker stated. “However that’s not what sexual harassment is. It’s an abuse of energy.”
A 3rd one who attended the dinner confirmed that he had additionally witnessed the incident. (The lady who was pressured that evening declined interview requests, saying in an e mail, “I’ve moved on with my life.”)
There isn’t any indication anybody reported the incident, and that’s not stunning to Bimbi. Crossing Parsons might be disastrous for an individual’s profession, significantly for graduate college students, Bimbi stated, who wanted Parsons’s blessing to make use of knowledge collected at CHEST.
“If he fired you, you misplaced your dissertation,” stated Bimbi, who’s now a professor of well being sciences at LaGuardia Group School. “That is the tradition: I can’t say a fucking phrase.”
However that was about to alter.
The primary complainant was Aaron S. Breslow, who had joined CHEST in 2010 as a analysis assistant. Like others who had been seeking to advance at CHEST, Breslow knew that the surest method to get forward was to drink with Parsons. The most effective alternative to try this was at one of many small pre-parties held in Parsons’s workplace earlier than the complete workers left for a CHESTFest or a contented hour, Breslow stated.
“He can be behind his monumental desk,” Breslow stated, “and everybody else can be on the opposite aspect of the desk, ingesting principally tequila and possibly vodka. He would speak about which workers he preferred and which he didn’t. He would ask for private particulars about workers.”
“In case you needed a drink, you wanted to method his desk,” Breslow added. “He would pour pictures for individuals. It was all about energy.”
Breslow stop CHEST in 2013. Earlier than he left, he reported his issues to the CUNY analysis basis’s human-resources division, he stated. Amongst different issues, Breslow stated, he described “a pervasive tradition of harassment, and a sexually hostile work atmosphere.” He talked about that the office was significantly hostile towards transgender individuals, telling officers that Parsons had as soon as referred to a transgender workers member as “a person in a skirt.”
Within the coming months, no less than two different departing CHEST workers complained to the muse’s human-resources division. One among them was William Mellman, who resigned in January 2014 from his place as a mission supervisor. Mellman complained a few poisonous tradition at CHEST, noting particularly his moral issues concerning the middle’s failures to guard worker privateness associated to gender identification and HIV standing. In response, basis officers urged he discuss issues out with Parsons, Mellman stated. “It was as in the event that they needed us to shake palms and transfer on.”
He would pour pictures for individuals. It was all about energy.
The muse’s human-resources division then heard from Jarad Ringer, who had been CHEST’s director of training and coaching. Ringer was shocked, he stated, to listen to workers discuss overtly on the middle about their very own drug use and their partying with Parsons. He observed, too, that Parsons would make feedback about workers members’ butts and say issues like, “I’m wondering who he’s having intercourse with.” After lower than a 12 months on the job, in October 2014, Ringer had grown so annoyed with CHEST that he stormed out of a senior workers assembly that had turned contentious. (Ringer’s supervisor quickly informed him that he wouldn’t be welcome again on the middle.)
Parsons was not current on the assembly, however one among Ringer’s colleagues texted the director afterward. Ringer had stated “he felt attacked, that he felt unsafe, that CHEST was bullshit, and he was going dwelling,” the colleague reported. Ringer, the colleague added, was “unhinged,” saying that he was going to the muse “to complain concerning the management right here at CHEST.”
Nothing within the communications, which had been offered to The Chronicle in response to a public-records request, suggests there was concern for Ringer. Slightly, he was described as a menace. Parsons’s quick response was to counsel that the workplace locks be modified. One other one who was current on the assembly stated that Ringer’s conduct was “surprising” and that she didn’t “really feel protected” round him, a doc reveals.
When Ringer contacted human assets by cellphone, he stated, “They informed me there had been a number of complaints about Jeff.” However Ringer’s issues appeared to go nowhere. “I positively felt like I used to be being dismissed,” he stated, “and I used to be pissed.”
Not one of the three complainants had been adopted up with, they stated. Wendy Patitucci, the muse’s senior director of human assets, didn’t reply to interview requests.
Along with Breslow, Mellman, and Ringer, a former CHEST administrator informed The Chronicle that, within the final 4 years of his employment, he had met informally a few instances a 12 months with the muse’s human-resources division, describing the middle as a poisonous office. The previous administrator, who by no means filed a proper grievance, choked up as he talked concerning the missed alternatives to rein in Parsons.
“I’m sorry,” he stated in a cracking voice. “It’s nonetheless extraordinarily emotional for me. After I first heard what occurred at that CHESTFest I broke down in tears. … Although I didn’t know the individuals concerned, I felt duty. I might be joyful to by no means hear his title once more.”
As complaints appeared to fall on deaf ears, a pervasive sense grew at CHEST that there was no level in bothering to report something.
“RFCUNY was the crew of enablers that propped up Parsons, completely,” Breslow stated. “We wanted them to step in and so they refused to.”
By 2014, there was mounting proof one thing was severely improper at CHEST. A few years after, although, Hunter School was toasting Parsons’s success in a sacred house. In 2016 CHEST celebrated its twentieth anniversary at Roosevelt Home, dwelling to Hunter’s public-policy institute. Raab, the school’s president, praised Parsons on the time for “brilliantly and passionately” guiding the middle, saying, “We salute him with nice admiration.”
Wearing a darkish go well with and pinkish tie, Parsons described CHEST’s evolution from a fledgling middle to a analysis behemoth that had raked in $55 million in grants. The key of that success, Parsons stated, was CHEST’s mantra: “Intercourse optimistic, no judgments.”
Three nights later, at Elmo, a well-liked restaurant and bar in Chelsea, CHEST gathered for a decidedly much less restrained celebration. Pictures from the occasion, offered to The Chronicle by a CHEST supply, present workers wanting on as Parsons lies on a bench with a bare-chested dancer in briefs grinding on his face, as one other works on his lap. One other picture reveals Parsons, martini glass in hand, his mouth agape over a fleshy dildo.
Photograph offered by an nameless supply to The Chronicle
What Parsons did in his personal life was his enterprise. However CHEST occasions, which workers felt obligated to attend, eviscerated any line between Parsons’s function as the middle’s director and his party-boy persona. Anybody who labored lengthy sufficient at CHEST was more likely to be summoned to observe the boss at a sexualized, alcohol-fueled work occasion.
All through the evening at Elmo, photographs from the middle’s historical past had been projected onto a display screen, attendees stated. Contained within the slideshow had been the 2 faces of CHEST. In a single picture, Parsons stood alongside Hunter’s president for a ceremonial ribbon-cutting in entrance of the middle’s new facility close to Penn Station. In one other, Parsons, wearing drag, gleefully gripped a stripper’s penis.
That didn’t work.
The next night, a Saturday, Parsons despatched an apology to CHEST workers members. “I wish to say how extremely sorry I’m for what occurred final evening,” Parsons wrote. “My conduct took what ought to have been a celebration of the fantastic work we do and created an uncomfortable atmosphere for everybody.”
“CHEST will not be made nice by me, it’s made nice by all of you working laborious on vital elements of our analysis,” he continued. “I’ll work to try to regain your belief, however I understand that may take time.”
Previous to sending the e-mail to all of CHEST’s workers, Parsons had despatched a draft model of the apology to another person whose title the college redacted in paperwork offered to The Chronicle. Within the topic line of the e-mail, Parsons had written, “Is that this sufficient?”
It wasn’t.
CHEST workers mobilized towards Parsons, making a collective case to rid the middle of its director and forcing motion from directors who repeatedly had left him unchecked. The fallout, which had been constructing since that fateful Friday evening, kicked into overdrive the next week, paperwork present. The middle’s workers filed complaints, and a few met with John Rose, Hunter’s dean of variety and compliance; and Patitucci, the human-resources director on the basis. Staff had been “traumatized,” they wrote in a grievance, by having witnessed a coworker “casually humiliated, harassed, and bullied” by Parsons.
A number of days after CHESTFest, Parsons had informed a colleague that “what they’re saying merely didn’t occur,” paperwork present. However there’s proof Parsons was closely intoxicated on the celebration. Days after the occasion, Parsons’s husband, Christopher Hietikko-Parsons, informed a CHEST worker that Parsons had “blacked out” after the celebration and remembered nothing of the evening, paperwork offered in response to a public-records request present. In one among Parsons’s personal textual content messages from the night, he wrote that he was “too drunk to learn” a work-related textual content. He added that he “might go blow [redacted] within the rest room.”
But because the partitions had been closing in on Parsons, he maintained that he would return to his publish after a yearlong sabbatical. He believed this, he informed colleagues, as a result of he had the backing of Raab, Hunter’s president. She had informed him as a lot in particular person, Parsons stated. On Wednesday, Could 9, 2018, days after Parsons’s transgressions had been reported to Hunter officers, Parsons was granted an viewers with Raab, he informed a colleague.
“Jeff stated that Jennifer had assured him that he would be capable to return after his sabbatical,” a CHEST worker wrote in an in depth account of the times after CHESTFest. “He stated that she informed him that ‘he can say he’s stepping down however that in her thoughts, he’ll at all times be at CHEST.’”
CUNY
Raab didn’t reply to quite a few interview requests or particular questions despatched to her public-relations consultant. Hunter School, citing privateness exemptions in New York State’s public-records statutes, refused to supply information of communications Raab might have had with Parsons. In response to a request for any information of the president’s assembly with Parsons, Hunter School stated none exist.
Buoyed by what he described because the president’s full help, Parsons privately lobbied 4 of his lieutenants to assist perpetuate the narrative that he wasn’t going wherever. “I’m not leaving,” Parsons wrote in a personal Slack channel. Doing so, Parsons reminded them, can be devastating to the middle and its workers. Grants tied to Parsons’s initiatives offered “64% of the funding to CHEST,” he wrote. “If I go away, 6 out of 10 jobs are misplaced.”
Parsons complained, too, of a “mob mentality” on the middle, the place anybody who dared to help him was ostracized. “Not everyone seems to be on the identical web page about what a demon I’m.”
Phrase unfold at CHEST that Parsons, who had evaded accountability for therefore lengthy, nonetheless appeared to have the help of Hunter’s president. Deliberately or not, Raab’s assembly with Parsons had lent credence to the notion that he remained untouchable. “That put the wind out of our sails,” a former worker stated. “He was laying it down: ‘Don’t even strive.’”
“I don’t need you to repair it,” one worker informed officers. “I need you to dismantle it.”
Nonetheless, workers stated they feared that Parsons would go unpunished. And what then? What would occur to those that had come ahead? “This can be a betrayal,” the worker stated. “He’ll destroy my profession if he returns unscathed.”
CUNY
In handwritten notes of the interview, an investigator recorded the worker’s plea: “STOP THIS. (tears).”
Days into the investigation, Patitucci, the muse’s human-resources director, was forwarded an e mail from a school member in Hunter’s psychology division who stated that “there’s a lengthy historical past of documented abuse” by Parsons on the Graduate Heart “that has largely been ignored.” Forwarding the e-mail to 2 high-level basis officers, Patitucci wrote, “The pile grows.”
On Could 17, 2018, almost two weeks after CHESTFest, Parsons was positioned on paid administrative go away as the middle’s director, and, just a few days later, as a distinguished professor. The middle’s deputy director, Thomas Borkowski, and CHEST’s operations director, Carlos Ponton, had been additionally positioned on go away.
Because the scope of the issue got here into view, the muse and CUNY employed an outdoor investigator to look at the allegations. It might fall to Debora L. Osgood, a former nationwide enforcement director for the U.S. Division of Schooling’s Workplace for Civil Rights, to sift by the sordid historical past that was now effervescent furiously to the floor.
In the midst of Osgood’s inquiry, a number of knowledge crossed the transom that raised questions concerning the obvious lack of oversight that had preceded this second. Complaints dropped at officers had appeared to go nowhere. Proof, together with images of untamed CHEST gatherings posted on Fb, had been hiding in plain sight.
At one level in Osgood’s investigation, she and Patitucci mentioned a seek for information of complaints from six totally different former CHEST workers. Patitucci knew of two such circumstances, she stated, however famous that the muse had, for a number of years, a “coverage of purging emails yearly.”
Seven years earlier than the investigation, a professor from Fordham College had caught wind of issues on the middle. David Marcotte, a Jesuit priest and medical psychologist at Fordham, had developed an intervention for HIV-positive substance customers that was being examined at CHEST. In 2011 an individual engaged on the examine stop, citing “excessive issues” with CHEST workers ingesting within the workplace within the presence of analysis members, paperwork present. In a short interview with The Chronicle, Marcotte stated, “College students had been involved. I do keep in mind them speaking to me.” Marcotte stated that talking any additional about CHEST can be “a bit dicey,” and he didn’t reply to a follow-up e mail asking if he had ever reported the issues to anybody.
Valerie Chiang for The Chronicle, photographs from Getty Photographs
Complainants who got here ahead after CHESTFest 2018 additionally made “allegations associated to monetary improprieties at CHEST together with the improper use of funds offered by CUNY and thru federal grants,” in accordance with a July 19, 2018, letter from the analysis basis outlining the investigative course of. However basis officers burdened that these issues weren’t throughout the scope of Osgood’s investigation. Nonetheless, some paperwork compiled throughout the investigation concentrate on cash.
In a single interview, an worker stated that the Stonewall occasion had been “charged to one among Jeff’s accounts that permits for alcohol use.” (An investigator, in handwritten notes, positioned an asterisk subsequent to this info.)
Different paperwork offered to The Chronicle give a snapshot of Parsons’s journey and bills. Over 10 ½ months in 2012-13, Parsons spent $52,234.62 on 14 journeys to conferences and conferences, information present. Six of these journeys occurred in June and July 2013, when Parsons visited Miami; San Diego; Lisbon; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Paris; and Honolulu.
Over the course of a single month, in July 2017, Parsons charged $4,105.50 to a buying card, information point out. Included within the bills are $1,131.81 for an iPad Professional in gold; $227.43 for transportation round Paris; and an $11.99 cost for Hulu, which is described in an connected receipt as “movies for analysis.” In that very same month, Parsons’s AT&T invoice included a cost of $944.76 for an iPhone 7 in gold.
Not one of the information set up proof of misconduct. Requested if CUNY had discovered that Parsons had inappropriately used any cash, a CUNY spokesman stated in an e mail, “No investigation has recognized the supply of any funds that he might have misappropriated.”
Lichtman, Parsons’s lawyer, responded with an announcement. “CUNY’s phrase salad response signifies nothing,” he wrote, “and the shortage of any prison investigation into Dr. Parsons signifies all the things. What CUNY must be saying is the straightforward fact: no monetary misconduct occurred right here.”
We wanted them to step in and so they refused to.
A number of former workers who spoke to The Chronicle questioned the propriety of CHEST’s enterprise relationship with Aware Designs, a video-production firm owned by Parsons’s husband. From 2011 to 2018, the corporate was paid $656,000, or a mean of $82,000 a 12 months, the New York Submit beforehand reported. A CUNY spokesman informed the newspaper that the Aware Designs association had been cleared by a conflict-of-interest panel. Paperwork offered to The Chronicle present that, in 2018, Jeffrey Slonim, the analysis basis’s chief counsel and board secretary, signed off on two impartial contractor’s agreements with Aware Designs totaling $210,000. (The second settlement was signed simply 4 days earlier than CHESTFest.)
Osgood’s investigation unfolded over a few 12 months, drawing on witnesses, paperwork, photographs, and movies. Taken collectively, Osgood concluded, the preponderance of the proof supported a discovering that it was extra probably than not that Parsons had violated a number of insurance policies, together with CUNY’s drug-and-alcohol coverage and its sexual-harassment coverage. Parsons was additionally discovered to have engaged in “unprofessional conduct.”
As for the deputy director, Borkowski, Osgood discovered he had extra probably than not subjected workers to unfair or improper therapy. Data associated to Ponton, the director of operations, weren’t offered to The Chronicle. (Neither Borkowski nor Ponton are nonetheless working for the analysis basis, in accordance with CUNY officers. Efforts to achieve the 2 males had been unsuccessful.)
Publicly, CUNY has stated little concerning the investigation, acknowledging nothing concerning the college’s personal breakdowns in oversight. On July 12, 2019, Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, CUNY’s chancellor, introduced that Parsons had resigned when confronted with disciplinary proceedings aimed toward his termination. The chancellor added that, going ahead, “Avenues for reporting potential misconduct have been strengthened and clarified with the workers.” Matos Rodriguez counseled the workers who had come ahead, urging others to report misconduct “so we are able to take applicable and immediate motion.”
Supplied with The Chronicle’s findings, a CUNY spokesman stated in an e mail on Tuesday that the college had responded swiftly “when CHEST workers introduced Dr. Parsons’ reprehensible conduct to Hunter officers.” Since Parsons’s departure, the spokesman wrote, “the college and its Board of Trustees have taken substantial measures to forestall equally poisonous conditions; to be sure that all members of the CUNY neighborhood are conscious of their rights and the way to report sexual misconduct; and to coach all these liable for receiving these complaints the way to deal with them with velocity and sensitivity.”
“We’re grateful,” the spokesman added, “for the braveness of the workers members and college students who got here ahead and put an finish to Parsons’ conduct.”
The type of accountability that many at CHEST had hoped for stays elusive: Who was liable for letting this occur? If Osgood’s investigation discovered a solution, CUNY selected to not share it with those that had united towards Parsons and compelled the administration to behave. Even now, the college received’t do this. Citing attorney-client privilege, CUNY denied The Chronicle’s public information requests for Osgood’s closing report. Paradoxically, the credentials that had made Osgood appear unimpeachable — an outdoor lawyer following the proof — have additionally served to make sure that the complete breadth of her findings and conclusions will in all probability by no means see the sunshine of day. (Osgood declined an interview request.)
What’s occurred at CUNY matches into a bigger nationwide sample. As survivors of sexual abuse and misconduct demand extra institutional accountability, schools have leaned on attorney-client privilege to maintain information beneath wraps. 5 years after Larry Nassar, a former Michigan State College sports activities physician, was publicly accused of sexual abuse, the college’s Board of Trustees has continued to withstand calls to waive privilege and launch all related information.
In sexual-misconduct circumstances, it’s “commonplace working process” for universities and different organizations to evade accountability by invoking attorney-client privilege, stated Rachael Denhollander, a lawyer and Nassar’s first public accuser. This ensures that the main target stays on the abuser, and never the group through which he operated, she stated. When survivors understand that the usage of an outdoor lawyer means they’ll by no means know the complete fact, they expertise “compounding trauma,” Denhollander stated. “What meaning is it’s not simply your abuser you’ll be able to’t belief,” she stated; “it’s all people round you, you can’t belief.”
Behind the scenes, CUNY and Parsons quietly agreed, in 2019, to authorized settlements totaling $1.4 million with individuals who had labored at CHEST, paperwork present. On April 30, 2019, a few months earlier than CUNY’s chancellor introduced Parsons’s resignation, CUNY and Parsons agreed to pay a complete of $425,000 in a settlement with a CHEST worker. (Of that sum, $75,000 got here from Parsons.) On September 3, 2019, CUNY, Parsons, and Parsons’s husband settled for $975,000 with 5 present or former CHEST workers. (Parsons and his husband agreed to pay $75,000 of that whole, allotted in equal components to a few of the claimants.) In each settlements, a few third of the cash went to legal professionals representing the claimants.
Each agreements include a key stipulation: The claimants can by no means counsel to “any particular person” that Parsons or CUNY have ever admitted to doing something improper.
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